A blog for Old Dungeon Masters, New Dungeon Masters, Tabletop Enthusiasts, and people who appreciate fantasy and science fiction.
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Friday, August 11, 2017

Games of Skill and Chance I: Hobbits

If
you are reading this, you love playing games.
Or are just a bad Googler and yet really committed to reading every link
you click on.

So
you love playing games—do you love making
them? Every new game I play, I think
up ways to twist the rules, make them better, make them different, and make
them awesome. I see dice and I want to
make them sing; I see cards and I want to make them dance; I see a table at
Ikea and I want to make sure it fits the Lord of the Rings Risk board with the
Gondor and Mordor expansion and still have space for everyone to arrange their
armies in meticulous phalanxes.

I
think of new games all the time. I
cannot help it. Most of them never get
polished and finished, and they die under the table of the classics. But some of them ... some of them turn out
awesome.

Hobbits

My
brother (you might have heard of farmane already) and I invented this game so
long ago I cannot even remember when. We
were bored in the basement of our grandparents’ house some years after the
trilogy came out, lamenting the fact that we could never find our copy of
Crossbows and Catapults, and all we had were dice. A lot of dice. A ludicrously ridiculous number of dice. Think about the number of different Monopoly,
Risk, and Yahtzee games you owned as a kid but lost the dice to—we took your
dice and put them in a big bag. We
played Poker Dice, but then we got bored, and we wanted something new.

So
we each rolled four dice. Then we put
them in order from greatest to least, one for each hobbit: Frodo, Sam, Merry,
and Pippin (no dice for you, Fatty Bolger).
Then you just add up all your dice, and whoever has the highest total
wins, right? No, that would be far too
easy. Easy games are for losers.

Frodo’s
die counts double, because of the ring.
(By the way: why is it so hard to say die? Even when I only have one, I just really want
to say dice. Screw you, weird singulars.) In fact, to win you have to win the Frodo
die. But what about Sam? He got the ring that one time. Alright, fine, you can still win if you win the
Sam die, but only if you tie the Frodo die—if your Frodo loses, you cannot win
at all. The game is a draw and you have
to roll again.

So
there it is. Simple enough, right? Wait, you say, you forgot about Merry and
Pippin, they should get some special rules too.
Alright, alright, calm down.
Since they are essentially indistinguishable, if you roll doubles you
have to make those two dice the Merry and Pippin dice, even if the doubles are
higher than your other dice. Plus you
can add 1 to your total sum for them being awesome.

What
if you roll three of a kind, you say?
Sam gets the odd dice out, since he is the real hero of the story. Two pairs?
Make Frodo and Sam the bigger pair, of course. That sounds like a sensible set of
rules. It is still a game of pure
chance, but at least now you have to figure out which dice is which. Not to mention the indignity of rolling sixes
for the dynamic duo and not being able to win because your Frodo got stabbed by
a Nazgûl or something.

Wait. This game could still get a little more
messed up. They are hobbits, right? Small, pointy-eared, furry-footed, good at
hiding? You know what the best roll in
the game should be, right? Four of a
kind. Four ones (and by the way, when you roll it, you have to shout “Hobbits”
as loud as you can, even if you are somewhere you should be really quiet—hey,
you decided to play the game). The lower
your four of a kind, the better. Except
four sixes, which is automatically the worst
roll in the game. Because hobbits.

And
there you have it. No really, I have
nothing else to add. The game is quick,
and you can play literally hundreds of times in one sitting, especially as the
frustration of multiple draws starts to stack up. You can bet on each round if you want, and
maybe have a Sabacc pot that the first person to get a natural Hobbits wins, or
just play for fun. In fact, a great
place to play would be when you have to line up ridiculously early for movie
tickets and your only other option is ranking all the movies you have seen from
greatest to least, and you already did that when you went to see the Star Wars
prequels and look how that turned out. Thanks
a lot, George. Maybe if you had played
some damn Hobbits we would not be stuck with Gungans.